Amazing news in the tragic tale of a 15-year-old student activist shot in the head by the Taliban: Malala Yousufzai stood up with help from her hospital bed in Britain today, ten days after the assassination attempt. The hospital released this photo, with Malala’s blessing, of the girl whose only “offensive” was to speak out for girls’ right to education and speak against the Islamic extremists in Pakistan who want to keep girls in the dark.

Doctors said that Malala is able to write, and may be able to speak in a few days when she gets her tracheotomy tube out. The bullet hit her left brow and traveled down through the base of her neck. After recovering to a sufficient degree, she’ll need reconstructive surgery on her skull.

This girl is not yet done by any stretch with the Islamic militants who have overrun her home. Meanwhile, the Taliban have been ordered to target journalists covering the shooting because Hakeemullah Mehsud, head of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, is upset about the bad press.

The Taliban’s “justification” for shooting a schoolgirl in the head? “We did not attack her for raising voice for education. We targeted her for opposing mujahideen and their war. Sharia says that even a child can be killed if he is propagating against Islam.”

Bridget Johnson is a veteran journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News.
She is an NPR contributor and has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media.

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1.
pre-Boomer Marine brat

THANK YOU for the update!

I just walked in, hadn’t had time to check the BBC or DAWN for the latest.

It’s a fine point. Her father’s very willing for her to get an education, and willing for her to have posted (blogged, back in Jan/Feb 2009) on the BBC Urdu web site.

The “perverse” angle, from our perspective, is that he cannot reconcile providing safety for her with the presence of (male) bodyguards necessary to achieve it.

He is mentally screwed. Malala is far more screwed. Pakistan, caught up in the rigid hyper-legalisms of all this and more, is not just circling the drain. It’s headed down it.

The losers are Pakistan’s common people, who’ve been taught to obey Islamist legalisms without asking questions. They live in the gulag of religiosity which Zia-ul-Haq was creating back when Barry Sotero blissfully visited Pakistan as a college student.

They didn’t ask for it. Zia and the Wahabbi-influenced Deobandis gave it to them.